The Metaphysical Ukulele

by Sean Carswell

  Meta rescued Leigh from her trance. “The little banjo is on loan from Ray Chandler.”

  “It’s lovely,” Brackett said, less about the instrument than about the way the secretary’s aristocratic twang breezed into the song.

  Hawks had no time for any of this. He snapped, “Bill!”

  Faulkner struggled to lift his gaze from the weight of his heavy eyelids. He seemed to live behind a wall eight feet thick. “Howard,” he said, slow and soft, as if the name had too few syllables so he’d necessarily drag each one through its own airburst.

  “Put down that God damn little toy and meet your new co-writer, Leigh Brackett.”

  Leigh stepped forward to greet Faulkner. Bill leaned the banjolele against a tin trash can. He grabbed a copy of Chandler’s The Big Sleep and flipped to the middle page. “Should you be agreeable to a simplified collaboration of this endeavor, I propose we divide our labors equally. I’ll bay the front half of this bear while you come around and assault from the rear.”

  Leigh turned to Hawks for a translation. “He’ll write the first half; I’ll take care of the second?”

  Faulkner blocked Hawks’ reply by grabbing both halves of the cheap paperback and struggling to tear it down the spine. The glue held strong and the pages, while fluttering like butterflies gathered in a net, refused to rip. Faulkner grunted and pulled, but proved no match for the pulp. Leigh wondered if everyone was embarrassed, or just her.

  Howard barked, “Enough of this nonsense. Meta, tell Leigh what she’ll write. Let’s get this show on the road.”

  It took eight days to write the script. Bill went on a bender for three of them. Meta signed his time cards for him. Leigh worked in the adjacent bungalow, on contract from Howard and not from the studio. As long as pages were typed, Howard didn’t bother with hours. Late mornings and long lunches flew just fine. Leigh’s only restriction was the ten o’clock curfew her mother insisted on. Brackett could’ve written it all at home, and faster, but for her aunt constantly interrupting, asking time and again why Leigh didn’t write something nice, something Ladies Home Journal would buy. It was worse than the screams from Bill and Meta in the bungalow next door. At least Meta could stand on her own, give Bill as bad as she got, happy to scream, “Your wife,” whenever something needed breaking.

  On the eighth day, Bill stopped by Brackett’s bungalow for tea. Meta stayed behind to type up pages from an opening scene between Philip Marlowe and General Sternwood. Faulkner brought his banjolele along. Leigh took it from him with all the gentleness of an Army doctor extracting a Mauser slug from a GI’s thigh. She strummed a tune, simple and sweet and with enough empty spaces between notes for her to slide the floating bridge into place and tighten the slack skin. When the sound was right, she handed it back to Bill, knowing his ear would never know the difference.

  Star Wars II: 1978

  Lucas peered up at the screen. The light from a gunfight in an intergalactic saloon splattered across his face. Something about his fascination with his own film was totally inhuman. His bright, intent eyes showed a curious mixture of intelligence and what could be madness.

  Leigh sat next to him and finger-picked the icy ukulele. She played along to the score of the film. This was her favorite part. The intergalactic saloon band knew only one song. The repetition of it left light years of space for her to improvise in. Brackett had sat in this screening room with this film so many times that the score had taken residence inside the twisted channels of her ear. Her ukulele improvisations had become the newest and freshest part of the film.

  And here it was, Leigh would think when she wasn’t thinking about the sequel. Here was her art in a nutshell. The form was rigid, intractable, beyond her control. But what she could do in those tiny pockets of silence between notes, it was Big. Even if only she heard it.

  George would tap his foot along with her ukulele. He’d never address it directly. She’d doctored enough scripts, done enough contract writing to know how to be invisible, how to contribute things that seemed to grow in place rather than be created by someone else. So when George heard the ukulele, Leigh was sure he heard it as something that he’d thought of first, that had been there all along.

  And George was a sweet kid. At the beginning of the movie, when the whiny hero was still in his desert home, George had asked, “Recognize this place?”

  “Sure,” Leigh said. She’d been to Arizona, driven over from Lancaster. Her and Ed passed through this very patch of dunes on the way to Tucson for one of those Hawks movies. Rio Bravo maybe. Or, no. El Dorado.

  “It’s your Mars,” George said. “Exactly how I pictured it when I read your stuff in Planet Stories as a kid.”

  George’s hand gripped tightly around the arm of the theater chair. Leigh patted his wrist, felt the tendons tighten under her fingers. “It’s perfect,” she said.

  But it was not perfect. None of it was perfect. She could feel the sickness thicker in her blood with every day in the screening room. Most times, when the ukulele got too cold and the film seemed to stretch across eons, she could up and leave. Get back to writing, which was what she was being paid to do, anyway. Lucas kept insisting she watch the movie. She couldn’t make it through. Even with George right next to her in this cozy screening room.

  Silent as cats except for the gentle rattle and whisper of tiny pills in a plastic bottle, Leigh took some of the medicine the doctor prescribed to her. The pills wouldn’t cure anything. They wouldn’t even take away the pain. They would just make her feel a little better about the final scenes in life she had left. Leigh swallowed a small handful with a gulp of water. It settled into her stomach like the distillate of all the sweet wickedness of the world.

  George was now perched at the front of his seat, his arms wrapped around the seatback in front of him, his knees nearly touching the carpeted floor. As flashes of a laser battle flickered across his face, she pictured him as an ancient, a trainer of old screenwriters and young Jedi knights alike. She’d call him Minch. Luke could carry all of her frustrations with Minch’s Force. Artoo could be her cancer, beeping and whirring as a constant reminder that he wasn’t happy with any of this.

  From another room, Lucas’s secretary called the boss away. George, legs asleep, wobbled out of the screening room.

  Brackett settled back into her chair. Her last thought before drifting off to sleep was her first rule of writing: the guy who signs the final check has the final say.

  El Dorado: 1965

  Howard and Leigh were back in Tucson. The wintertime desert felt worlds away from the Ohio ranch where Leigh and Ed did their writing in adjoining studies, Mars to the Venus of her marital home. The distance apart was mitigated by the script she’d written for El Dorado. It was her finest work yet. It wasn’t tragic, but it was one of those things where John Wayne dies at the end. Hawks said he loved it. The studio loved it. Wayne loved it. “All it needs,” Howard said, “is a little polish on it.”

  He flew Leigh and Ed out to Los Angeles for this polish. Ed took up residency in their home in Lancaster. Leigh followed Howard from LA to southern Utah to Tucson. “A little polish on it,” Leigh knew, could mean anything from rewriting damn near the whole thing to just rewording dialogue enough to make a man out of a Mitchum or Wayne. She brought along her traveling typewriter. Lightweight, speedy keys, always at the ready.

  Good thing, too, because “a little polish on it” this time meant taking the finest thing she’d written and turning it into a remake of Rio Bravo, which she’d written already.

  The waning sun streaked the mesas a blood orange on the outskirts of Tucson. Gaffers and grips rolled cords and folded screens. Camera men packed their lenses and stored the dailies. Robert Mitchum headed off for the nearest bar, looking like nothing more than a tin badge pinned to a drunk. John Wayne loitered around the director and the writer, waiting to petition for an extra line or an extra one after that. Howard said, “I need some new lines.”

  Leigh felt it coming like a
sap to the back of the neck. “I wrote you new lines,” she said. “What you want is some old ones.”

  Howard swatted Leigh’s words away like so much desert dust gathered into the fibers of his slacks. “It’s where the girl comes into town…”

  “Which girl?” Leigh asked. “Angie Dickinson?”

  “Sure. Angie. Whatever the hell her name is,” Howard said.

  Duke interjected. “Angie’s not in this movie. The girl has to be Charlene or Michele.”

  “Charlene. Michele. Angie. What’s the difference? The girl comes in on a stage and blah blah blah. You get it Leigh?”

  “I get it.” The desert seemed to have drifted into Brackett’s mouth. Grains of sand ground into her back molars. “I wrote the damn scene eight years ago.”

  Duke looked down at Leigh from a perch that felt about eight feet above her. “That’s right,” he said. “If it was good once, it’ll be just as good again.”

  Leigh stomped off to her trailer, lines for Angie or Charlene or Michele racing through her head. She typed with a view of the sunset spectacular out her window. She wrote until the dark shut down.

  Star Wars II: 1978

  Leigh dropped off the first draft of the sequel with Lucas. George wore no mask between himself and his excitement. If he’d had a tail, he would’ve wagged it. “I can’t wait,” he said, short of breath like even the words took him away from the reading he wanted to do. “I’m going to read this right now.” His eyes didn’t rise from the page to address Brackett. She watched his glance dart across the words. This must have been what a young George looked like when his new issue of Super Science Stories arrived in his Modesto mailbox, when he raced inside and tucked himself into his father’s oversized armchair and read “The Citadel of Lost Ships.” Leigh gave herself a few moments to indulge in this fantasy, to think of all the boys and men so excited to swallow the pulp that she and Ed had been grinding out for most of the middle of this century. When the moments passed, she remembered the most important thing.

  “Um, George, honey,” she said. “There is the matter of my check.”

  Brackett’s words ripped Lucas from his ice planet and back to this dark mahogany office. He gulped air against the bends. “Yes. Yes,” he said. “Of course.” He reached into the bottom drawer of his desk, extracting his ukulele. A paycheck was woven into the strings. “I know you played it to help yourself write,” he said. “Take it. Take it and the money. It was always too cold for me, anyway.”

  Leigh stuffed the check into her purse. The check itself was the size of all checks. The number on it was large enough to take care of her for the rest of her life, a span of time she knew couldn’t be more than a few weeks. She cradled the ukulele in her arms. It was preternaturally cold as it had always been. George’s mind jumped into hyperspace. He landed on the ice planet before Leigh could say goodbye.

  She headed down the hallway. Lights had been extinguished. Night awaited outside.

  Leigh knew she’d written her final work. It was better than the Star Wars that had come before it. Brackett—whose heroines had never simpered or fainted, melted or whimpered—had taken a lot of the princess out of Leia. She’d given the character some of the old verve Brackett had given Bacall back in the war years. Maybe that dancer’s daughter could do something with those lines. She’d given Han Solo a father who could teach him how to be a man. She made Luke, the whiny little blond kid, into a real hero, one who could best Darth Vader in hand-to-hand combat at the end. And the scenes with Minch were the best. Leigh was certain George would love them.

  Of course, she also knew that some younger version of a Brackett would come along and put a polish on her screenplay. There was no telling how much of a polish, what would get shined up and what would get shined off. She only knew polishing would occur.

  Brackett held the cold ukulele close to her breast, chilling the metastasized blood inside. “I’ll be there soon, Ed,” she said, pushing the studio door open.

  She stepped into the starlight.

  Mad Nights of Springtime

  In the lettuce fields of postwar America with a cold Pacific fog drifting over the Santa Clara River valley just north of Los Angeles, a young Jack Kerouac wandered into the campsite of itinerant Filipino farmhands. He was not even thirty; not yet on the verge of a fame that would come to destroy him. The farmhands strummed their Catholic hymns on a ukulele. Little Jack, Ti Jean as his blesséd old French Canadian mother called him, felt the air vibrated by song and strings and experienced the satori to carry him into the great nothing. It was beginning and end.

  As with any great religious observance, the farmhands kept wine nearby. An old, thin man waved Jack in. The old man’s giant hands were all out of proportion for the bony arms they dangled at the end of. Those hands—too big for picking strawberries or blueberries or any berries but just the right size to cradle a cabbage in his palm—welcomed Jack and pointed to a seat where Jack sat and accepted the circling bottle of wine and sang along. Could they be singing in English? Yes, Jack. It’s “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” with thick pidgin accent. This song so much like the songs of Lowell in that tender childhood, father still alive, brother still alive, everyone alive and in love with this beautiful world that postwar America could now only see as prewar America. Prewar America couldn’t have known they were pre-anything. Nor could the young rootless Jack, wandering on the road that would become On the Road, know he was pre-Kerouac.

  So Jack sang along. A farmhand straight out of Hawaii like so many of these farmhands who left the sugar plantations of the Big Five or the pineapple fields with its barbs tearing through every glove and cloth to hunch down in the foggy soil of row crops passed the ukulele along to Ti Jean. The sweet little nun who had soothed Jack’s hands, knuckles bruised from her sisters in the cloisters, by teaching him to play the guitar in those long gone beautiful days of Lowell and now he knew how to hold those slender fingers, so dexterous from days at the portable typewriter, into chords at least guitar chords and those ears so good for dialog could also hear the difference between an A and a G and could find the notes of a scale. Pretty soon the Filipino farmhands taught Jack to play the song that the Mexican farmhands had taught them, a simple three-chord arrangement that invited all to dance not like a sailor but like the captain. Jack played the song. Families of farmhands clapped and sang along and banged blesséd camp spoons against camp cooking tins and swung babes in arms and held sweethearts close in order to dance (para bailar la bamba).

  As the wine dwindled down and sweethearts and mothers and fathers with babe in arms lay down to rest for the night and even the thin old man with his giant hands could wrestle only scattered seconds of awakened consciousness between deep snoring rhythms, Jack searched the strings and notes of that old taro patch instrument until he found the chords for “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?” He sang it softly to the valley and fields and Filipino farmhands and his lovely Mexican girlfriend in the adjacent camp with her crazy brothers mumbling “mañana” in their sleep. This America.

  In the mad nights of springtime Corte Madera many years later, Locke McCorkle gifted Jack a handmade ukulele. Locke made the uke himself, carved the neck from a trunk of sun-hardened myrtle felled right on the property where Locke built his home and the guest shack where Jack and Gary Snyder lived that spring. The back and sides were made of that same myrtle milled down to thin planks matched with a thin piece of ancient redwood for a soundboard. One strum and the air vibrated with the natural sounds of Bay Area, 1956. Jack quickly learned to play folk songs to be sung by the fire and songs para bailar. He played these on nights and parties in McCorkle’s house, Locke and wife nude and dancing with Gary nude with nude girlfriend and nude Allen Ginsberg and nude Peter Orlovsky and even clothed Philip Whalen on the side tapping a nude foot and Jack the itinerant bhikkhu sadly strumming upbeat songs. He developed a way of playing the uke spontaneously. The first note was always the best note. Songs followed a loose pattern of solita
ry introspection and solitary introspection with mad wild parties in between. All songs sounded similar but each was its own unique experience. Improvisation never to be repeated. Nude Locke and nude Gary and nude Allen and nude Peter and nude women and bodhisattvas all demanded songs they could dance to. Jack’s spontaneous sounds were abandoned during the parties. Structured strumming of pop songs took their place. Later, though, sitting atop his little feather sleeping bag in deep grass next to Gary’s little cabin in the hills with Gary asleep or off with one of his many women, Jack played his deepest painful pleasure in solitary celebration. First note, best note. Always.

  Locke’s wife sewed a padded bag for the ukulele, specifically designed to cradle the soft redwood soundboard and hold the uke close to Jack’s revolutionary rucksack. With rucksack on back and Locke already at work for the day and Locke’s wife and children cleaning away to the sounds of the living room hi-fi, Charlie Parker spinning at 78 rpm, Jack knelt in honor of the Corte Madera innocence that would soon be lost (could he know this at the time?) in a summer of desolation and an autumn of scandal and explosion.

  On Desolation Peak, Ti Jean barely touched his ukulele. He stared at the redwood grains and dreamed of Corte Madera and the parties and the friends and the social life that on the peak had been reduced to nightly radio conversations discussing muffin recipes. Jack traced the flaming patterns of myrtle waving along the neck. He picked up the ukulele and dreamed of times playing with farmhands and beatniks, or of playing guitar with nuns or toying with a cuatro for the lovely Esperenza Villanueva. The first note was no better than any other note because no Desolation Peak note was played into the silence that surrounds us all for eternity.